Monday in Germany will be a day off.  It’s Pfingsten.

In England known as Whitsun, or in the US as Pentecost, we at Babbel thought this was worth giving a mention since it’s got to do with some business that concerns us: Speaking in many languages.

It’s celebrated 50 days after the resurrection of Christ (Easter), and around the time of  the Jewish festival called Shavuot, which celebrates Moses receiving the ten commandments at Mount Sinai. Pfingsten signals the day when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and gave them the ability to understand and speak all languages. According to the Bible, they went out into Jerusalem prophesying and speaking in languages that all the people in Jerusalem could understand — also known as speaking in tongues.

We’re very pleased that we’ve been selected to present for the start-up track this year at Next09, which will take place in Hamburg May 5 and 6. Next is an annual networking and trend conference for the European web industry.

The theme  of the conference this year really resounds with Babbel: the idea is “Shared Economy”. The basic concept is that the more businesses share their success, the more they can ultimately profit – an idea the we too share!  Markus Witte, Managing Director and one of our founders, will present Babbel to some of the other 1500 participants, familiarizing them with our experiments with a “freemium” model and the fun of learning while helping one another out on the Babbel platform.

One film the Babbel Bloggers caught during the Berlinale (February 5-15) was “Beeswax”. This is American auteur Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, which premiered on Monday, Feb. 9th. His genre, if it can even be classified as such, has been coined as “mumblecore”. But as a talk with him made clear, in his work and in the film world in general, often the last thing words do is clarify. You can still catch a screening of Beeswax in Berlin tonight or on Friday.

Babbel Blog: When I saw “Beeswax”, I was thinking about how I could connect it with issues of language. One thing that stood out to me in the movie was how you have this divide – or conflict – between personal and business language. “Are we business partners or friends?” “Am I your boyfriend or your lawyer?” That sort of thing.

Andrew Bujalski: Whenever I have to sign contracts it always produces a great anxiety in me, because I read the language of the document and it’s never language that I’ve written, or language I would necessarily subscribe to, though you’re not given the option to line-edit every contract you sign. But what’s frightening about them is that they are written in a language which doesn’t resemble the personal language you would use to suss out if you and someone you’re working with are working toward the same goal.

Andrew Bujalski

And it’s always interesting to me that even though it might technically be English, it never feels like English in the way that I use it or a way I would use it in my daily life. It’s language not meant to clarify as much as to codify or often obfuscate. So I was interested in the differences between …. people will use legal language toward a certain goal, and of course if they’re working together they have to use human language to work toward that same goal, but things are at cross purposes and they butt up against each other as I think they do in the film.

BB: Do you have personal experience with this sort of conflict between these two types of languages?

AB: To some extent, because I’ve always worked with friends, and there’s always inherent challenges in working with friends… I mean, the benefits far outweigh the difficulties. But there’s always an element of both…. when you try to clarify and codify that, for me it’s always uncomfortable to draw up any sort of document with someone you have a personal relationship with. Something always feels painful to me about that. And I think the film certainly gets at that.

BB: Your fims have been classified as “mumblecore” which I’m sure has become a buzzword you’re tired of being asked about…..

AB: It doesn’t really mean anything.

BB: I was thinking about the language of the film though, maybe it comes from this specific place, that is, as the characters are somehow similar to me – American, with a certain class background -, I can sort of relate to them directly, I know where they’re coming from. But I was wondering – if you have an international audience watching it, if there can still be some sort of claim to universality?

AB: I don’t know. I certainly hope so. I certainly would want universality for the film. On the one hand I think my films are in a strange place, because people have said – well, many Americans have said to me — “this would do great in Europe”, and I think what that means is that it’s quiet, it’s artistic, so maybe some of the aesthetic values are more in line with a European film tradition than an American film tradition. But on the other hand, I think the fims are extremely American, the cultural specifics of them, and it’s down to the cadences and the slang. Even the pauses and the hesitation in the speech feel specifically American. Are they going to translate very widely? Probably not. But I think that any film … cinema is a magical thing. And as much as it allows you to go all over the world… I don’t expect us to be a smash hit on any country on earth, but I do think the film can be understood anywhere.

BB: You were talking about the film being interpreted as “European”, but also how the content is quite American. Something I also noticed about the film is that there aren’t any clean resolutions, and cinematic clichés are constantly being evaded. For example the character Jeannie is in a wheelchair, but it’s never an issue; or when her employee is crying we never find out why. It never goes where as seasoned moviewatchers we think it should go. Maybe this is a stretch, but could this kind of cinematic language be interpreted as European (even if it’s said as an epithet?)

AB: In America there’s a notion that Europeans have more patience. May or may not be true. I guess it’s probably true.

Also America is the home of demographic research. So programming a film according to what test audiences press buttons on. And there’s a lot of things in this film that a test audience would not approve of.

BB: Why wouldn’t they?

AB: Oh I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. If I were in the test audience I’d give it a ten out of ten every time.

BB: Who are your actors?

AB: They’re all nonprofessionals. Well…. even that gets a little shady, defining who’s professional and who’s not. But for the most part they don’t live in New York or LA or pursue acting fulltime.

The twins, Tilly (pictured above) and Maggie Hatcher – Maggie I went to college with, met her ten years ago and met Tilly soon after that — and they’re both such remarkably charismatic people. And then you put them together and there is this just this sort of instant fascination — I have a half-brother and siblings, but I didn’t grow up with a brother in the house. I think like a lot of people I am fascinated by twins. So it was just in the back of my head for a long time, if I could try and capture, or ride some of the fumes of the magic of that relationship, that would be a great thing to bottle up and get on screen.

It’s sort of a…. whenever you’re trying to take something magical from reality and get it on screen, you’re asking for a… well, there’s something a little hubristic about it, but I think that’s what filmmakers do.

BB: Yes, they’re clearly sisters in real life, and the way they communicate with each other is also this very natural way of speaking. Though you wrote the script, how much of it was improvised?

AB: It all hews pretty closely to the structure of the screenplay, and that was true in my earlier films and even more true in this one, because this film has shorter scenes and there’s more exposition squeezed into every scene. So there’re a lot more specific points that need to be hit to keep the story on track. So again… I’ve never been able to… People have always asked me, what percentage of this is improvised? And I don’t know what the number is, I don’t even know … I have trouble with the question because I feel to some extent that ALL acting is some sort of improvisation.

But there are moments in there. A funny language example – and a funny twins example – there’s a bit where Tilly’s character Jeannie uses the word “scorching” to refer to this evening she spent with an ex-boyfriend. That word wasn’t in the script. But then “scorching” comes up again later when Maggie’s character, Lauren, is talking about the salsa they are eating at a Mexican restaurant. And she says it and she sort of raises her eyebrows and it almost… I mean, I think in the film it seems like a direct reference or a reflection on the other scene. But that was something I didn’t write – I didn’t write the word “scorching”in either scene, but both of them put that in independently without knowing the other had come up with it! That’s another great twin confluence. In the editing, I thought, “that’s sort of amazing”, that was a gift they gave me without knowing that they gave it to me.

BB: Lastly, the movie kind of made me think of “Slacker”. Not that the movies are all that similar, but that that movie was like the generation before, and “Beeswax” clearly has something that speaks to people in their 20s and 30s now. Is there a special way of talking for this generation that is portrayed in the film?

AB:I don’t know… that’s another question I have trouble with. You know, the word generation comes up and I tense up. I wonder if that will be on peoples mind with this film. My previous two films were about people in their twenties, and for some reason, when you’re talking about people in their twenties there’s a tendency for people to want to say, “are you defining a generation”. I think once people start to get older, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s… nobody cares about that generation anymore, you know, it’s like the generation has been defined. So as I’ve gotten older certainly, and the characters have gotten older, I…. I don’t know if it will be asked to define a generation anymore. We’ll see.

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/magic-mumblecore-and-not-exactly-talkin-bout-my-generation-interview-at-the-berlinale-with-andrew-bujalski/feed/ 2 http://blog.babbel.com/library-to-go-google-books-go-cellular/ http://blog.babbel.com/library-to-go-google-books-go-cellular/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:55:54 +0000 Mara http://blog.babbel.com/?p=662 While I have long since forgone interactions in the physical world in favor of their counterparts/improvements online — listening to the radio, going to the videodrome, banking, learning German, just to give a few examples — one thing I can’t bring myself to throw into the dustbin of materiality is a good book.

But also as a bibliophile who’s packed up and crossed oceans for good more than once, I can attest to one of books’ major detriments: weight. So my interest was piqued to hear yesterday that Google has just made 1.5 million ebooks from Google Book Search available on mobile devices.

Now, as of now these are only books in the public domain, meaning pretty old stuff; I can’t say that I often have the urge on a train ride to work to peruse say, Beowulf. Also the transfer of older scanned books to text for easier reading on a cellphone can often result in a bit of a verbal mishmash, as the LA Times notes.  But it seems that Amazon.com is also on the case. They announced simultaneously that they are now working on making contemporary and out-of-print titles that are already digitized for the Kindle e-reader for access on mobile phones as well.

In the meanwhile,  for those too impatient to wait to read the latest airport novel without all the fuss of pages, Amazon is scheduled to unveil the latest version of Kindle on Monday.

The speech that followed was rather spare, at least in comparison to the soaring rhetoric to which his campaign followers had become accustomed. Some interpreted it as taking inordinate amounts of slings at the departing administration, while others saw the simple prose, calling for responsibility, duty, service and sacrifice as a nod to, or a “reclaiming” of (an even Reagan-esque) right-wing type of talk.
Either way, all sides are acknowledging the effectiveness of “Obama-esque” language. Newsweek contended that Republicans have begun to ape the new president’s language by invoking the “grass roots,” even though what they signify with it might be something else completely.

But really, does any “side” have a monopoly on the tenets of faith, responsibility, duty, etc.? In a thoughtful comment, New York magazine saw Obama’s rather flourish-less talk this time not so much as a copy or re-framing of rightist language, but rather as a mysterious strategy towards cohesion.

In the meanwhile, this unified language has been making its way around the world, prompting a full translation for the deaf, a bestselling English-teaching text in Japan, and a freak last-minute censoring on Chinese national television.

Polyglot happy wishes to Babbel.com that hasn’t stopped talkin’ since it launched in January 15, 2008! (Pictured at a little birthday shindig from a hazy last night in Berlin above.) Have any multilingual birthday wishes? Comment away… and check out some of behind the scenes features below to see a bit more how the intuitive, interactive language learning platform ticks. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, happy Bday, feliz cumpleaños, joyeaux anniversaire, buon compleanno!

The Babbel Blog team took a short trip on the UBahn over to the Berlin office of Babbel.com, the interactive language-learning platform, to speak with Ulrike Kerbstadt (right) and Sylvie Roche (left). They are Just two of the folks responsible for the learning content at the website. Click here to listen to the interview that is part one in a series taking a gander “Inside Babbel”.

Babbel Blog: What do you do at Babbel?

Ulrike Kerbstadt: I’m responsible for language learning content. I develop the material with a team of native speakers and have the didactic background.

Sylvie Roche: I’m content editor and work with the same team developing other kinds of content.

BB: What is Babbel, what does Babbel do?

UK: On the one hand, you vocabulary packages, you can learn a set of words for a special topic, we also have writing tasks where you can interact with other people, communicate with the community in real-life situations and we have what we call interactive tutorials.

SR: On the other hand we have the community platform where you can learn for yourself but of course with other people. Other people are going to correct you. You can ask any question about translation or what you will find in a country when you go on vacation…

UK: Yeah, that’s the other specialty we have… we have this huge community of native speakers where you always get real feedback, you have real-life situations and that’s really motivating for our users.

SR: For example we have the writing exercises, and concretely, we ask you a question, you have a small video or some pictures, and you can write something about it. You send it to someone you don’t know, to the community, then the community or special people you have chosen answer to you. Sometimes it develops some internet friendships, and people are going to write more to each other. And we see that that really happens.

UK: We also have other features like the chat or direct messaging, or the board, where you get a lot of user feedback, comments and so on. Many opportunities to communicate.

BB: Where did the idea for these features come from, what’s the philosophy behind them?

UK: We think that curiosity is the key to language learning, and with an internet platform like this we can really keep that curiosity alive, put people into real situations where it’s necessary to communicate. So they’re motivated, there aren’t inhibitions to use the language, even at an early stage, at a low level. Because every user is a language learner, everyone who teaches you something or corrects you also learns a language, and that really makes it easier for you.

SR: An important thing is, we’re teaching European languages, but many of our users don’t come from Europe — but they are still native speakers. For example, we have Spanish speakers who come from Mexico, so if you write something in Spanish because you’re learning Spanish, you will send it to a Spanish speaker, but you might send it to a Venezuelan or a Mexican, and people will tell you, well, in my country, people might rather say this or that.

UK: You get to know people from Algeria, Morocco, you learn so much about different cultures… there are so many topics to talk about.

BB: Could you give us a favorite example of a writing exercise?

UK: I quite like the exercise about “A Holiday in the Desert” — You have to make up something, describe an extreme holiday. And you have pictures that go with it… most of the time these pictures really stir up emotions or are really funny, that’s really motivating to write something.

SR: Actually I really like the one – though most of the users didn’t do it – where Jenny was worried about her rabbit, and John had cooked rabbit for dinner, and what happened to the rabbit? She went away… was she right or wrong to do that, and why? And lots of people didn’t do that … There was one that was quite popular, What do you do in your free time? Most of the people wrote very simple phrases, but we had a lot of answers. For example, on the weekend I like to play basketball and have a walk with my dog. And then other people say, that’s funny, I have a dog too, what’s your dog? So it’s not only about the language. Of course, people correct each other, but it’s about communication, interaction.

BB: So imagine you’re creating a new tutorial from scratch. How do you start it?

UK: At the beginning we sketch everything out, we have a little draft of the content, then our technicians here have made a very nice tool, the Tutorial Builder, and it works a bit like power point. You have all these different components, and can put together pictures with dialogue etc., or make a multiple choice task, and you decide if you want speakers with the text or do you want the text to be in the mother tongue or in the foreign language, also design things…

BB: The way you lay out material, does that come from books?

UK: Well, there’s the European Reference Frame, which gives advice as to what kind of learner needs what kind of knowledge at whatever stage, and we follow that.

BB: What is that exactly, the European Reference Frame?

UK: It’s for all language learners in whatever language you might be studying, there are special communicative situations where you have to get around — for example as a beginner you don’t have to be able to write a letter but yes take a note. Of course we also have a look at material in books etc.

BB: Have either of you worked as teachers before?

UK: I taught German as a foreign language here in Berlin, and of course there it’s a completely different situation in front of a class. Here what we develop is self-learning material. It’s important to keep people motivated – have a learning effect behind the fun. But here it’s much more the fun factor. That’s out priority.

SR: I was in international schools my whole school time, learned French and German, but moreover film, media in the university. So I learned how to learn, and what’s the problems are in learning, what can stop your curiosity. So I think I make a good team with Ulrike, because she knows how to teach things, and I’m more knowledgeable about breaks that can occur in learning. So together maybe I’m more the “fun” part. And she’s maybe more serious – well, she has the more serious background. Together we work well.

BB: How many languages do you speak?

SR: Well, French is my mother tongue but I speak five other languages…

UK: I learned translation from English and French (to German), but also a bit of Spanish and Portuguese.

SR: I think what’s also important to us is – as you said – to learn only things you can apply in every day life. What’s important is what you learn and not something that’s in a book that’s very correct but that you’ll never use because no one ever says it.

UK: Yeah we take care that the material is funny, the pictures are funny — I think we have a lot of fun developing the material, we have a good laugh together!

BB: Where do you think Babbel is going? Where do you see it in 2010?

SR: This year we tested a lot, Babbel grew. Before we were only five, and now we’re twelve with a lot of freelancers. I think what we tested is that the community is very important and still very important. .. this fun factor is very important and we will keep on doing that. With users uploading their own pictures so they’re involved, but also – content that is really serious and … “Babbel approved”. You can really go away, shut your computer down and say, I learned something and in a week I’ll remember it. It’s really a serious matter too.

UK: And maybe we’re going to have more user-generated content someday. That people build their own exercises and put them online, then you have a picture from the person and other users can vote if it’s a good tutorial or a bad one. Everyone can build material like us. Everyone can play teacher.

SR: As I said before, we have people from the community who come from all over the world, and the fact that you go to another country and learn how you speak there in that country… if it’s user-generated content then they will say, well if you come to my country and order something in a restaurant, you have to say these kinds of words

UK: You could learn for example Scottish English… Australian, etc…

BB: Are there other languages coming?

UK: Yes, we were thinking about Turkish, Portuguese, and Chinese and Arabic we would love too, but that might be complicated with another alphabet…

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/inside-babbelcom-curiosity-is-key/feed/ 2 http://blog.babbel.com/martes-trece-bad-luck-in-spanish/ http://blog.babbel.com/martes-trece-bad-luck-in-spanish/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:18:26 +0000 Mara http://blog.babbel.com/?p=552 Babbel.com is closing in on its first anniversary on Thursday, the 15th, when we will be launching an ‘Inside Babbel’ series chronicling a bit of the goings-on behind the scenes at the language-learning website. But we thought in the meanwhile we’d give you the heads-up on a slightly older anniversary today, which would be the biblical confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel, which ostensibly happened on a Tuesday, the 13th.

While Anglo-Saxon cultures tend to avoid unnecessary travel and watch their backs on Friday the 13th, in Spain, Latin America and Greece Tuesday is the day to look out for. As Martes (Tuesday) in Spanish is linguistically linked with Mars, the god of war and violence, its combination with number 13, long a bad luck número, is almost too much for some to take. According to wikipedia, there’s actually a condition called Trezidavomartifobia, a paralyzing phobia of Tuesday the 13th.

Now, I say dubiously scientific here because I’ve always been suspicious of this whole “expatriate” idea. Not to mention its cutesy shortened form, “expat”. What makes an expat an expat, rather than an immigrant (or shall we say, to make it equallly cute, an “immy”)? HSBC did not set out to define, among the 2,155 persons they surveyed, what an “expatriate” was other than “an individual who relocates to another country”.

In the meanwhile, it seems that anxiety about “relocating” types in Germany has begun to simmer a bit. There have been rumblings of adding an article to the constitution simply stating that the language of Germany is German.

According to the Independent, this is due to worries about the encroachment of “Denglish” – the English peppered mishmash that has brought Handy, downloaden and babysitten into the language. On the other hand, another motivation for the legal move may be to buffer the inferiority complex that comes with the disparagement of the language by the rest of the world, starting with – to be rather scientific about it – comedienne Tina Fey, who in a recent Vanity Fair article called German “so uncool”.

(via Omniglot)

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/liebe-deutsche-liebes-denglish-germany-named-love-destination-for-expats/feed/ 0 http://blog.babbel.com/have-the-users-think-what-youre-doing-is-great-simon-murdoch-on-online-services-today/ http://blog.babbel.com/have-the-users-think-what-youre-doing-is-great-simon-murdoch-on-online-services-today/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:33:33 +0000 Mara http://blog.babbel.com/?p=480

Babbel.com, our humble sponsor, recently acquired and joined forces with the online social networking site Friendsabroad.com. We caught up with Friendsabroad founder Simon Murdoch to talk a bit about this phenomenon of online language learning and the internet biz in the wake of the crunch.

Babbel Blog: Please talk about Doyouspeak.com and Friendsabroad.com. What are they, how long have they been around and how did you come up with them?

Simon Murdoch: My personal background is in the internet business, and I’ve been a VC investor and and an angel investor in the internet businesses. Then around 2004 I decided I wanted to get involved in language and technology, so I actually set up Friendsabroad in 2004. The idea was for it to be a pure language exchange, and helping people to connect, to talk to each other with emails, and then text chats, and then we added a skype integration of sorts. Doyouspeak is a separate website that we launched in the beginning of this year, January 2008, which is more purely targeted at English, it’s an online English school. So a completely different model than the Friendsabroad system.
What was your particular interest in language learning?

Like other English and Americans I’ve always been aware that we don’t speak as many languages as others around Europe, so I wanted to do something to make it more motivational, really, using technology. Mostly those of us who learn languages do it in a very dry way, at school or from books or even from CD-ROMs or tapes, and it’s not as interactive and interesting as when you meet real people, so we set up Friendsabroad with the view that by meeting people and interacting with people it would make it much more motivational, and therefore more engaging. There are a lot of people on the site, and it does keep your interest going.

How many languages are on there? What are some of the more popular ones?

It’s like on Babbel – EFIGS – English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. But we do have over eighty languages on there and there are people doing unusual things. Unusual mixtures. Japanese people talking to Portuguese people for example.

Online language learning has lately become a bit of a phenomenon. But in general, what do you think could be better in that world?

The thing that makes online language learning interesting from different points of view is that it’s an enormous market, there’s a huge amount of people that want to improve their language skills, in many countries. It’s fun to connect with people across language barriers and borders. One of the things I’ve found a challenge is: How do you do something that people are willing to pay for? Because most of us when we learn languages we do it at school and we don’t pay for it. I saw a survey a little while ago, one of the questions was, what would make you learn a language, and a number of people said they would learn a language if it’s free.

What could be done to improve it? I think the challenge is – you can make the content very interesting. And you can make the process interesting by connecting people.

What other things does Friendsabroad have in store for the future?

Well we’ve just had this deal where we’re still operating the site but we’re encouraging people to move over to Babbel, so we’re not doing any further developments. We’re handing the baton over to Babbel.

What advantages – or disadvantages — do Babbel.com and Friendsabroad.com, have in comparison to their competitors?

I think – I know it’s supposed to be global, but — one of the advantages we have in Europe is more experience with people who speak other languages. People are so used to doing business across borders, Germany in particular is very impressive with this. So I think having a European focus helps with having the right attitude.

I think compared to competitors, one of the challenges in Europe is that the US has access to funding. One of Babbel’s main competitors in the States has raised six million dollars, and it’s a lot easier to raise venture capital and angel investment in America. I guess that means we need to be smarter over here and produce a better product to be successful.

Do you really think though the ability to raise more money is based on producing a better or worse product ? I mean, when you’re comparing Europe and the United States? Is there a different culture for the funding of online projects?

I mean it’s relatively easy, especially on the west coast of the states, to raise money for online projects. I think in any of these projects the thing is to delight your customer, and the good thing about Babbel is that the content is fresh and interesting, it’s really like that in any service, whether it’s offline or online, the important thing is to have the users think what you’re doing is great.

What advice would you have then for startups these days in Europe or America? Especially now with the economy fraught as it is?

I think the economy is challenging… and it means that we’re back to basics, you might say. The important thing is to find a service for which customers are willing to pay the right amount of money . Even in the States I think financing is harder to come by than it was before the crunch, and so any business that wants to survive and thrive has to do a great job for customers. My key piece of advice for any startup is that they concentrate on their business model.

So you worked with Bookpages.com before you sold it to Amazon.co.uk and then continued to work there. What was the difference between working at these two companies?

The key difference was – I was relatively young when I started Bookpages – they’re quite English, if you like, and it was interesting when they became part of Amazon. Amazon was an ambitious American company. I think they perfectly named the company. The name (Amazon) is a very generic name because the aim was to provide a site where you could go for anything. It didn’t have “book” in the name. It had connotations of greatness. And now they sell just about anything online to many countries in the world. And Bookpages only sold books in the UK. So that American ambition was very interesting!

Now if I were to compare Bookpages to Friendsabroad – an interesting comparison in terms of setting up a business – Bookpages was unusual in the sense that it had successful businesses to emulate, Amazon, etc. And even now the model of selling products online, commerce, where you’re selling physical products and delivering to people, is a very well established business model. There are many successful commerce categories in many different categories.

Now compare that with Friendsabroad, where there wasn’t a company to emulate and copy, if you like, and one of the things we have found challenging is finding out how to do something that would be a good business model for us, something that’s at a level where customers want to pay. So … I think that experience has been quite different.

What about Doyouspeak.com? How is that different from Friendsabroad?

It’s better but it still proves an interesting challenge, because people are still not used to the idea that you can have a physical teacher through the internet. But that model is still better than Friendsabroad.com where people are not so keen to pay for a social community. I mean, people are used to things like Facebook being completely free, paid for by advertising. We didn’t actually charge for that social community, and I don’t think we could have anyway.

Are people responding well to Doyouspeak.com?

Yeah, we have teachers in the UK and students mainly around Europe and a few in South America. The students like the service, it’s good having a “real English teacher”. The calls are easy to do, we have an online classroom, on the screen etc., so the whole service works really well.

Lastly, have you ever tried to learn a language online?

Yeah!

What are you studying right now?

I’m doing a bit of French here and there. I also have a face-to-face teacher here in England. And I use language exchange things like Friendsabroad.com to get in contact with people and get motivated. I have tried over the years to learn from books and CD-ROMs and I don’t seem to gain anything that way. It’s much better to have a teacher and exchange partners.

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